Okay if you INSIST I'll talk about why I think Rowling and Cawthon seem to resent their audiences 🥰
Let me preface what I'm about to say with 2 things:
No editing this post, I'm just gonna talk shite as it comes to me and you'll all deal with the typos as a part of my deeply flawed but charming nature
Everything I'm about to say is through the lens of a SERIALISED author, ie someone who releases creative work in installments, as opposed to a creative work that's whole and complete on release. I think this fundamentally changes the relationship between the art and audience, because in the case of a complete work, both parties understand that no feedback will influence the work that's already been released. This is obviously not the case in episodic work, no matter how much creators wish to not be influenced by feedback between installments. We're all human - we all want to know what's being said about us, and make our work better by the next episode.
Okay SO here's my fucken gripe with Harry Potter's lore. I'm NOT ignorant to all the racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, anti-Irishness etc present in these books, and let me be clear from the start: All that shit is WAY MORE IMPORTANT than anything I'm about to say, BUT it's not what I want to discuss here. This post is specifically how peeved I am about the artist-audience relationship. The stakes are wayyyy lower than they are for all that horrendous real world shit, but these are still the stakes I plan to nail into the vampire's heart.
When I was a teen, I was a HP superfan. In retrospect, I wonder how much of my interest came from the outside world telling me I SHOULD be interested, and I never really found a lot of joy in reading the books - but I found a LOT of joy in talking about them, theorising, and imagining offshoot stories with my friends. I don't think it's a big stretch to suggest that one of the driving forces behind HP's success, aside from all the toy manufacturers and marketing campaigns manipulating our stoopid tiny child brains, was the WORLD and the SETTING as opposed to the plot proper. When I think back to the fan forums I frequented in my early, unsupervised adventures on the world wide web, most of the discussions were theories about what WOULD happen in later installments; what throwaway detail could be enormously relevant later, what minor characters had secret, speculative histories, what the common rooms looked like, the trapdoors of Hogwarts, the wizarding schools of the wider world, etc. As a baby author-in-training, I idolized JK: Here was the perfect example of a woman who had reached astronomical heights from the simple act of storytelling. And so I was surprised at myself when, at about 17 years old, I experienced the newfound act of critical thinking - and got upset with JK for the first time.
At this age, oblivious to the wider social commentaries around the books, I heard someone say something about how Rowling had confirmed on Twitter that Neville Longbottom marries Hannah Abbott in the future. I felt a fizzle of annoyance that at the time, I could neither rationalize nor explain. These were characters I didn't have any personal headcanons for, these were characters whose romantic lives bored me, in short, this was an announcement in which I had absolutely NO skin in the game. But it ANNOYED me.
It niggled at me for years, this first little inclination that I had a problem with Rowling, until in the avalanche of weird Twitter disclosures and Pottermore articles that followed (Dumbledore is gay, wizards shit on the floor, there's one wizarding school for the whole continent of Africa) I finally put my finger on it.
In my eyes, in my world, the story of Harry Potter was Complete the moment the final book was put into print. It was supposed to belong to us, now. To the readers. All the fun of speculating and theorising and mining for details was being stamped out, one hyper-specific detail at a time, by an author who resented the idea that we could have a story that no longer included HER. In short, she made access to the Harry Potter lore a condition of interacting with HER personally: following her twitter, following her blogs, following Pottermore. To me, this was a very strange betrayal of the author-audience relationship, not so unlike a child who has been given a toy for Christmas, but instead of being allowed to play with it, they're only permitted to watch the Gift Giver play with it the Correct way.
Obviously, in the ensuing years, my criticisms of Rowling have become more numerous and, as I said at the beginning, more high stakes. My principal disagreement with her and her work is quite soundly founded in her real-world politics. But this little betrayal has always stayed with me; one of those enduring little bitch-fuels that flashes in front of my eyes every time someone suggests separating the art from the artist. Rowling doesn't WANT US to separate her from the art - and not even in the political sense - from a PURELY artistic perspective, she prohibits engagement with her work that doesn't go through HER, first. There's no theory you can posit, no plot hole you can spot, no exploration of the deeper lore that won't eventually be met by some ill-thought out declaration of hers that contradicts you. To me, nothing is canon unless it exists within the work proper - nothing she's said after the fact has a fucking ounce of merit in my artistic consideration of these books.
The attempt to inject diversity into a very white, very straight series instead of simply saying "You know what, guys? I didn't think about the necessity of diversity deeply enough when I was writing. I regret that now and want to do better in the future." Instead of admitting to ANY conceivable flaw in the story, she says "ACTUALLY there's a REASON for that and it's NOT a plot hole and I've ALWAYS been right about it from the beginning and YOU just didn't have all the info!" As Shaun pointed out in his iconic Harry Potter video, there's a "one book lag," where she hastily ret-cons or patches over any observation or criticism made by fans about the book previous. Time travel stops existing in book 4 after playing a pivotal role in the plot in book 3, fans notice and ask questions, so in book 5 Neville knocks over a shelf and breaks all the time travel tools in existence. Truly a resentful way to treat your fanbase, and a way to preserve her own ego above all else. No, she never made a mistake. Never forgot she put time travel into her fantasy books. Rowling was right all along, and you stupid fucking readers don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
It's this ego that leads me, in turn, to Five Nights at Freddy's.
Before I start talking shit about the silly dead children robot game, I want to include a brief and personal opinion (sorry). I truly enjoyed FNAF when it first came on the scene. I loved the setting, the intrigue, how sparse the story elements were. The more questions you have, the better. It's fun to search every inch of the game for any clue as to how you got here, what's happening, why things are the way they are. Even though I think the gameplay itself gets repetitive quickly, I think FNAF 1 is a great case studio for telling a good story without telling any story.
As a writer myself, any sort of episodic fiction manifests to me like a love affair between artist and audience. This may be a little saccharine, but I think the artist offers their work much like a token of courtship: look at this beautiful thing I created. I did it for you, for your pleasure, for you to understand me. And the audience, when enthusiastic, repays this offering with attention, discussion, and often adoration for the artist. Obviously when projects get into corporate territory, money muddies the water a lot. But from a solely artistic perspective, I do consider the dynamic of episodic art to be deliberately titillating on both sides, even without any individual intimacy.
Which is why I absolutely fucking HATE HATE HATE Scott Cawthon's method of "storytelling." Holy Jesus Christ I have wanted to rant about this for so long, but FNAF fans are reactive and passionately defensive (as any good lover ought to be), so to bring these feelings to the public is like kicking a fucking hornet's nest. But here with my tumblr girlies, I believe you'll at least consider my opinion fairly.
The FNAF method of "storytelling" is to feed you a small amount of detail, and then as soon as you start to follow any rational thread of connective tissue, Cawthon introduces brand new info to completely invalidate your theories and treat you like a fucking idiot for thinking that in the first place. If good episodic fiction is a love affair, then FNAF is a gaslighting shit head who makes you feel insane just so he can smugly "prove" to you how smart he is.
I could go into the nitty gritty details, but let me give you the biggest examples of this shitfuck behaviour:
In FNAF 1, we learn about the "bite of '87," where someone's frontal lobe is bitten off. Then in FNAF 2, this bite supposedly happens to the player character. A great twist to end the game on, says I! Then in FNAF 4, another character gets bitten in the brain. Okay... So there's a "bite of '83." Two bites to the frontal lobe, that's not so bad. What an interesting twist, to make this iconic piece of lore happen twice!
In FNAF 1, we learn about 5 missing kids. Wow! Then in FNAF 2, we THINK we're learning about those same 5 kids being found dead, I guess, but - oh! The twist is it's a prequel. A totally DIFFERENT set of kids also went missing/got killed. What an interesting twist, to make this iconic piece of lore happen twice!
In FNAF 2, we meet the Marionette - an extremely dangerous antagonist in the game. It has notable tear streaks on its face, possibly from the child ghost who possesses it. In FNAF 4, we see a "Crying Child" with tear streaks on his face. Omg! That must be who's possessing the puppet! Nope! In a later installment (I can't remember honestly), we find out the puppet is possessed by a DIFFERENT crying child named Charlotte! There's two crying children! What an interesting twist, to make this iconic piece of lore happen twice!
In FNAF (???) we see a Purple Guy - presumably the security guard responsible for killing all the dead children. Then in a different FNAF (??? I've lost track of which game honestly) we see a DIFFERENT Purple Guy, sometimes called Pink Guy! What an interesting twist, to make this iconic piece of lore happen twice!
In FNAF (???) we find out the owner of Fazbear Whatever It's Fucking called loses a child and they possess an animatronic. Then in FNAF (???) it turns out there's a SECOND owner of Fazbear Fuck who ALSO loses a child that possesses and animatronic! What an interesting twist, to make this iconic piece of lore happen twice!
On that same point, in FNAF 4, Purple Guy's child gets killed by an animatronic. The fandom speculates that this explains why he became evil! Then, in Sister Location, a second Purple Guy's child who was never mentioned or acknowledged in any previous installments gets killed by an animatronic! What an interesting twist, to make this iconic piece of lore happen twice!
I could go on, but hopefully I'm painting a picture for you here. It's hard to impress what an absolute cluster-fuck this story is, because now it's officially "complete" and (with a LOT of heavy lifting from fan theories) the pieces have been fit together. We only had to hack off a fuck tonne of it to make sense, good for us! But when this story was releasing episodically, the only way I can describe my feelings towards it (and the subsequent death of my enjoyment) was creative gaslighting. No, you fucking idiot, that piece of information NEVER meant what YOU thought it did, you fucking troglodyte. Guess what? That exact same piece of information happened a second time in completely unrelated circumstances! How fucking stupid you are for not having guessed that.
There are only two reasons, in my opinion, to tell your story this way.
The first is that you absolutely fucking resent your audience for doing the one thing your relationship with them demands: engage with the work. They're thinking, speculating, growing attached, discussing - and this seems to infuriate the ego of a creator who can't let them be right, can't let them make sense. If, as Cawthon claims, he's known the full story he wanted to tell from FNAF 2, and he's only retconned ONE THING (undisclosed what it is), then he's been very deliberately telling his story in a way to demoralise fan egos while inflating his own, as the only one smart enough to see the wood for the trees.
The second reason, is that FNAF stopped being fun by game 3. It's a resource management game with jumpscares, at its core. The gameplay has never been what invited players to it. When you watch Let's Plays of FNAF games on Youtube in 2025, all I can see in the players' eyes is exasperation. They're playing for 2 reasons: To say they beat the custom night at the end, and to mine for Lore. LORE is the reason people still care about FNAF, it's the only thing bringing in the bucks now. And for that reason, the Lore can never be Finished, the story can never be Told, we're all just donkeys following a carrot on a stick so they can make as much money as possible on games that feel like an absolute chore to complete.
I find it actually quite hideous that, when story is the thing fans desperately want from this series, story is the thing that they'll never be allowed to have.
And that is what I mean when I say these stories absolutely resent their audiences.
